Very cheap paysites. Why not?
 

Most paysites charge ~$30. Some $35 per month.

If I was a paysite owner, I would try $5 a month, monthly only.

We are so used to see big numbers, and small conversions.

Imagine if you had a 10% conversion rate instead of 0,5% or whatever is your current number?

The rebills would be great. People wont cancel so easily something if it is ultra cheap.

:bowdown

We made a ton back in the day with 9,95 memberships, no one cancels or charges back. .

Then again if price is the only criteria a customer has he will use free sites. It takes a "personal interest" to get someone to join a site these days. If you have what that customer is specifically looking for price is not that important. :2 cents:

I use this philosophy with my clips stores. I look at it this way.. I'd rather sell something several times a day for say $3.00 than once a week for $30.

With the exception of clips4sale - because they don't give me as much control over my pricing as other clips sites, I generally select the lowest.. or close to the lowest price available. it works.. people buy.

And here's the beauty.. when it's that cheap.. it doesn't even have to be good. They'll still buy it. A lot of the stuff I sell isn't even edited.. just straight from the camera with a watermark added. What you see is what was shot, mistakes and all.

I figured it out a while back. It costs me on average $500 to shoot between 10-12 scenes of a single model. (or about $40/scene). That means that at $2 per sale, I only need to sell 50 of each scene to double my money.. give or take.. taking clips store fees into account.

You can sell 50 of just about anything for $2..

porn site membership purchase is impulse descision , thats what i read.

it does not matter if the surfer likes the content and his penis is up, he will join even for 39.99/ month

Your :2 cents: makes sense

agreed, if cookie cutter bullshit then sure lower your price and be the GoDaddy of porn, if the content is hot/niche $20/$30 won't faze them. :2 cents:

Alternatively you could split test and see if the lower price rebills longer and makes up the difference of a discounted price in the end, only downside is how many affiliates would wanna rev share on $9.95 so you would probably lose some free promotion traffic.

Nailed it...

Sad that I have been in the biz long enough that 1997/98 ideas that people stopped doing 10 years ago are making their 107th lap like its something new.

Here's a newsflash. Users will pay for value. Users don't like to pay for crap. Sites with great content still convert just as well as they did 10 years ago.

2 months ago i removed the 1 month non-recurring option and raised the 1 month recurring from 19.95 to 24.95. No decline of sales! I kept and also raised the 3 month non-recurring; 6 month non-recurring and added a 1 year non-recurring. $$$ increased. Rebills are up. People that REALLY hate rebills buy a non-recurring. Even sold a couple of 1 year subscriptions this month $124.95 each! Sales volume up 25%. Currently 350+ videos on the site.... I'm not going to degrade my product and give it away for $9.95. First: I think 24.95 is a reasonable price for my product. They could skip a trip to McDonalds this month if they think it's expensive. Second: I don't think that cutting the price in half will double my sales with the same amount of traffic. But if it did then bandwith also would increase... etc... So... i have to double sales to keep same volume but costs will increase.

Might not be sustainable to charge so little.

Its been done and not successful. Meaning its way easier to find 100 guys to pay 30$ than 600 guys to pay 5$. Along those lines that if person is ready to join 30$ sounds ok for him.

Will be hard to find affiliates who wants to earn just $2.5 per sale.
Price is not the problem when the product is unique. The problem is that there are not unique paysites.

I do a lot better with expensive sites

what matters is to dare to pay with a credit card. Once the card is out, the price itself doesn't matter so much.

That's exactly my experience.

I tried low price sign ups like $3.99 plenty of times. (CC company didn't even allow lower)
Not only did the number of signups stay pretty much the same, but none of the $3.99 rebill.

I figured it like this; when someone pays only $3.99 then how much do they really like this content anyway. When someone joins for $29.99 then they are more interested and stay a member for longer.

And then the big draw back : The person who is willing to pay $29.99 does not want to sign up for a $3.99 site because "how is this cheap site going to be worth a shit?".

Think about this way, if you were looking for a cheap hotel at the beach would you even look at the one for $15 a night? Not me!!!

.

Yes, when something is supposed to be classy. Cheap means bad...

Terrible idea.

I'll be starting a new venture soon so you guys can get solid advice on this type of thing.

$5 per month is the new $39.95

Figured I'd chime in. I've tested this. It hurt.

I won't go into the psychology of pricing, because who really knows, but I'll share the end results:

When I changed my pricing from $24.99 to $9.99 / month, my revenue went down dramatically. I always had people that forgot to cancel and let memberships rebill until their cards expired... but it was never more than before.

People seem to fall into one of two categories; Willing to pay, or not willing to pay.

It comes down to how mind-blowing your content is, and how easy it is to find free scenes on the tubes. If he can't find it anywhere... your surfer will be forced to part with his cash.

I still think for most paysites charging less might be better, but of course for those sites "really premium" like wowgirls.com the price should be expensive.

My point is: do something different. a different business model.

If I had an average paysite I would charge less. Something like 5 or 10.
If I had an extremely top paysite, with expensive production and girls, I would charge more than average. Something near 50.

I realized now that several nice paysites are just charging $10 for one year subscription. This big difference between 30/month or 120/year doesn't make any sense. It seems that they are just lost, without any strategy.

The numbers wont lie, and a test is a test. Better knowing what works or not, than guessing.

Thanks for all the comments! I really appreciate that.

P.S.: Things change fast. If you had a bad experience in the past, today is another day, and things might respond differently.

Do not forget about Perceived Value :)

From things i have read and discussed with people removing the .00 .99 .95 as a change to something .86 etc would increase your rebills as if someone is scanning their CC statement that number won't ring as a membership as fast.

You guys that are talking about "doubling" sales are not doing the math correctly. You will need to do more than double in sales to make up for a 50% cut in price due to various fixed costs and also an increased price in hardware/bandwidth. I would be impressed if anyone can cut their price in half and triple their sales, which is about what they would need to do.

Ask the music industry how it's doing, having devalued their product (songs) to $1 a piece. CD sales are dead, "album" sales are dead, music itself is fucking DEAD.

When you devalue a product you get what the customer thinks it's worth (i.e., nothng). plus, if it's only a couple bucks why not steal it? No - UP your prices, RAISE your prices.

That is exactly what i said.......

There are other factors that are not being taken into account though

For example -

1) Increase in rebills - I know of some paysites that charge $9.99 per month & they rebill forever
2) Decrease in chargebacks - $9.99 or less doesn't stick out on the cc statement the same way as $29.99

I'm not saying it works for everyone, I'm not saying it won't result in less income but the days of charging $29.99 are long gone

PR_Dave said it best :2 cents:

IMO if you're charging more than Netflix for a porn membership your customer isn't getting value for money.

Jeeeezus man! At $5/month there isn't any meat on the bone if you have affiliates and you pay them $2.50 off the top then 10-15% to your processor. LOL You'd be the one paying for your paysite.

$5 a month:1orglaugh

And no... the days of charging $29.99 are not gone at all...
It's still the most common used price for a paysite...

Btw 35% of my members take a non-recurring membership which start at $49.95...
So yes... people pay $49.95 to get in... no problem... Not everyone is broke.

Affiliates rule this world... So you'll have to ask them how much they want to promote and push your $5 a month website. And if they say, "$15 per join." There is another program that will pay them $20 per join. Or $30... And may have to raise their price.

Damn it.


.

Much cheaper and less hassle to generate your own sales than to rely on affiliates

Laugh/mock all you want :)

The simple fact is you can get unlimited streaming Films & TV Shows for $7.99 a month, the reason why it's that price is because that's what consumers are prepared to pay.

You can get unlimited music streaming with Spotify for $9.99 per month

Just because most people are still charging $29.99 doesn't mean it's the correct coarse of action. Those same people are still complaining about how porn memberships are dead, ratios suck, signups suck etc

It's always blamed on piracy, the tubes, torrents, Manwin bla bla fucking bla. There is always an excuse :)

But will anyone accept their pricing model is flawed, that they've refused to adapt or change in anyway,

For that same $29.99 surfers can now pay for Unlimited Films, TV Shows & Music and still have $12.01 left in their pocket.

Yes... but they can't get StrugglingBabes for $7.99 a month:) My price is 24.95 for a month. My sales are not dead. In fact this is my best month ever! My affiliates averaged a 1/454 conversion-rate this month so far. My bounce-rate is less then 1% and i'm not on the tubes and torrents...

Will this topic ever stop coming up?

The question on whether the user will pay for a porn membership or not rarely has anything to do with the price of the site. Charging them less than they would otherwise be willing to pay is just hurting your bottom line.

A $10 site will not make 3 times the sales of a $30 site. This has been tested over and over.

I think you want to produce a site that sells for 50 bucks a month and have customers look at their statement saying: "Yes, it was worth it."

Isn't videoz $15-$20?

No man - charge $0.99 per membership and do it via mobile!!! Rebills forever and ever and ever and ever and.............whatever.

Yet Sky still have millions of subscribers each paying anything up to $100 a month or so, for not much more than what netflix charge.

netflix *had* to go in at that rate to even get noticed. Let's see what their price is in about 5 years time before arriving at the conclusion that cheap = more :2 cents:

Actually, selling individual tracks at a buck a pop is what is saving the music industry.

The Big Five fucked over consumers for years. Forcing them to buy albums full of shit for the one song they actually wanted. Their sales are fucked because when CDs came out, everyone rebought the albums they already owned creating a massive artificial hockey puck curve of sales. Once those people had rebought the content, sales slowed down.

Now, they offer what consumers want. Individual track purchases and of course the HUGE success of streaming services such as Rhapsody, Rdio, Spotify etc.

The music industry is being saved by these digital legal downloads.

The derp is strong in your post.

^ btw I'm just pointing out you can't use a catch-all argument, no more than that :thumbsup

You got that righ, but still you gotta make potential customers make the right decision for themselves.:winkwink:

and spotify, rdio, rhapsody, etc etc.

Yes, they are all mental and will be charging $100 a month in 5 years.

Or, they are astute and clever and priced something just right.

netflix basically doubled their price when they split streaming and discs up...